Inbound marketing for lead generation

If you've been madly blogging on your website, tweeting and posting to facebook and Linkedin but feel disheartened with the results you are probably missing some critical steps to maximising the value of your efforts.

Before you invest any more of your valuable time on creating blog and social media posts you need to...

• reveiew (or create) your strategy to make sure you're helping visitors regardless of which stage they're at in the  buying cycle (awareness, consideration or purchase phase)
• ensure your content is valuable to your audience
• get the right auotmated system in place that will measure what is and isn't working for continued optimisation and to nurture visitors into customers - so you can appear very attentive while you're actually knee deep in your daily business functions.

Inbound marketing is probably one of the most important online trends over the past year for quality lead generation because it enables business to attract and engage visitors, converting them to customers by informing, inspiring and building trust through the buying process.

Successful Inbound Marketing

The key to successful content marketing is to avoid selling.

The first time a visitor comes to your site they are a stranger.  Whether they are at the beginning of the buying cycle - researching 'whats out there' and assessing products or services, or your visitor has an urgent need and is ready to make a committment, your content needs to match their expectations.

Understanding how your visitors find your site will help to understand where they are likely to be in the buying cycle. Google searches and review sites tend to deliver people later in the buying cycle (Consideration or Purchase stages).  Social referrals such as Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook, banner ads etc tend to deliver visitors who are just becoming aware that there are products or services which can help solve their need.

Your content needs to help and inform, prove that you really know what you're talking about and that your advice is credible. Providing valuable free information in the form of ebooks, whitepapers, infographics helps to build trust.

You content strategy needs to address each of the visitors at the appropriate stage and have a work flow to nurture those not yet ready to commit.

Improved SEO & Distribution

The added benefit of consistently producing new, useful content is the positive impact it will have on search rankings. And if your keywords and SEO are well optimised for each piece of content you'll have a greater chance it will appear in results driving traffic to your site.

By creating lead in articles on sites such as LinkedIn with links to your full blog or download you're adding inbound links which are valuable to your SEO efforts.  If you guest post on another's site ensure they include a bio and link to your site but more importantly that the content of their site is relevant to yours otherwise you could have invested a whole heap of time and energy writing content with no ROI.

For even more practical tips and techniques for boosting your lead generation with content marketing download our free ebook The 30 Best Lead Generation Tips, Tricks and Ideas now.